In:
Marketing Science, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), Vol. 42, No. 1 ( 2023-01), p. 48-60
Abstract:
In light of the widely discussed political divide and increasing societal polarization, we investigate in this paper whether the polarization of political ideology extends to consumers’ preferences, intentions, and purchases. Using three different data sets—the publicly available social media data of over three million brand followerships of Twitter users, a YouGov brand-preference survey data set, and Nielsen scanner panel data—we assess the evolution of brand-preference polarization. We find that the apparent polarization in political ideologies after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 stretches further to the daily lives of consumers. We observe increased polarization in preferences, behavioral intentions, and actual purchase decisions for consumer brands. Consistent with compensatory consumption theory, we find that the increase in polarization following the election of Donald Trump was stronger for liberals relative to conservatives, and that this asymmetric polarization is driven by consumers’ demand for “Democratic brands” rather than the supply of such brands. From a brand perspective, there is evidence that brands that took a political stance observed a shift in their customer base in terms of their customers’ political affiliation. We provide publicly available ( http://www.social-listening.org ) access to the unique Twitter-based brand political affiliation scores. History: K. Sudhir served as the senior editor and Juanjuan Zhang served as associate editor for this article. This paper was accepted through the Marketing Science: Frontiers review process. Funding: The authors thank the Marketing Science Institute for the 2018–2020 Research Priorities Research Grant Competition grant and Bocconi University for the Junior Research Grant 2019–2020 that provided funding for this project. Supplemental Material: Data and the web appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2022.1408 .
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0732-2399
,
1526-548X
DOI:
10.1287/mksc.2022.1408
Language:
English
Publisher:
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Publication Date:
2023
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2023536-7
detail.hit.zdb_id:
883054-X
SSG:
3,2
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